The first, and so far, last, female editor of the New York Times has found a second career as a spokeswoman for the lunatic Left, writing in the pages of Britain’s Guardian. Still preaching to the Upper West Side, however, Ms. Abramson has saved the money graf for last in her latest column:
It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.
Some people… but on to the main story, in which Abramson is among the last to the party, hopefully speculating that a “blue wave” will demolish president Trump and the GOP this fall. Why, just look at Texas! And all those strong women!
With new Democratic voters racing to the polls in big numbers in Tuesday’s primaries, Texas is looking purple rather than Republican red. That’s big news, especially on the heels of Democrats winning recently in Alabama, where Doug Jones beat Roy Moore, and Virginia, where Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor.
Republican gloom in Washington DC is palpable, with White House chaos, Donald Trump’s sinking approval ratings and incumbent retirements piling up. This week brought news that Mississippi’s long-serving Thad Cochran is leaving the Senate. That has left the Republican party searching for a replacement strong enough to defeat a Roy Moore-like rightwinger in an upcoming primary from which Cochran has decided to withdraw. And a special House election in Pennsylvania next week looks dicey.
Though winning control of the House of Representatives in 2018 is their focus, my Democratic sources say that there are already 20 credible presidential challengers giving serious thought to opposing Donald Trump in 2020. The list, unsurprisingly, includes a raft of Democratic senators, and, perhaps surprisingly, at least three strong women, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren.
The fact is, as I’ve been saying for months now, there’s little to no evidence of any building “blue wave” coming this fall, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that. The Alabama election was a one-off, the Virginia governor’s race pitted a strong Democrat against a Republican retread with zero charisma: no lessons to be learned about Mississippi from either of those. And as for Texas:
Texas has had the longest Democratic dry spell of any state. The last time a Democrat was elected statewide was in 1994. That’s why there is so much pent-up passion for Beto, who is emblematic of the Democratic new wave, unabashedly liberal and well-financed.
The El Paso Democrat is 45 and has a background every bit as interesting as his name. Beto is a nickname for Roberto (his first and middle names are Robert Francis) and his surname is Irish. He’s fluent in Spanish and represents a Texas district that is 75% Hispanic (Texas is 28% Hispanic). He is dead set against Trump’s border wall.
In other words, he’s an Irish-American pretending to be Hispanic, i.e. a typical Democrat.
A critic of the war on drugs, he’s for legalizing pot and banning assault weapons. A graduate of Columbia University in New York, he performed for a time in a punk band. But Texas likes quirky politicians and O’Rourke defeated an entrenched incumbent in a primary in 2012, the same year Texas sent Cruz, now 47, to the Senate.
He should be cruising to a second term victory, but instead he’s running scared, issuing a blistering radio ad that attacked Beto on Tuesday night, deriding his liberalism as out of step with Texas and making fun of his name. Set to a country music tune, the ad said: “Little Robert wanted to fit in, so he changed his name to Beto and hid it with a grin.”
Of course, there are months to go until November and Beto has to be considered an underdog. Still, it’s thrilling to see signs of a Trump rebellion building in the Solid South, the Republican base where religion, racism and love of guns have advantaged Republicans since Richard Nixon’s election in 1968.
No wonder the Times fired her. Even they couldn’t handle this level of deranged partisan hatred in an employee masquerading as a dispassionate journalist. But it’s always nice — if scary — to see the mask drop.
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